Summary: Developers slowly realise that they are being bamboozled and exploited by Apple; Microsoft treats developers similarly, but it incentivises for defection away from GNU/Linux

SEVERAL days ago we wrote about the growing developer backlash against Apple. Paul Graham, who is highly regarded in his field, argues that this has caused great harm to Apple's reputation among developers.

I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.

The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.

Microsoft is currently trying to capture Free software developers, using stunts and money. Apache is a recent example of this [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18].

"I notice the effect [that] Microsoft is having on Apache," rants one of our readers. "Apache can't even be bothered to stream in open formats." ⬆